Mobile phones enable their users to conduct conversations in many different acoustic environments. Some of these are relatively quiet while others are quite noisy. There may be high background or ambient noise levels, for instance, on a busy street or near an airport or train station. To improve intelligibility of the speech of the near-end user as heard by the far-end user, an audio signal processing technique known as ambient noise suppression can be implemented in the mobile phone. During a mobile phone call, the ambient noise suppressor operates upon an uplink signal that contains speech of the near-end user and that is transmitted by the mobile phone to the far-end user's device during the call, to clean up or reduce the amount of the background noise that has been picked up by the primary or talker microphone of the mobile phone. There are various known techniques for implementing the ambient noise suppressor. For example, using a second microphone that is positioned and oriented to pickup primarily the ambient sound, rather than the near-end user's speech, the ambient sound signal is electronically subtracted from the talker signal and the result becomes the uplink. In another technique, the talker signal passes through an attenuator that is controlled by a voice activity detector, so that the talker signal is attenuated during time intervals of no speech, but not in intervals that contain speech. A challenge is in how to respond when one of the microphones is occluded, e.g. by accident when the user covers one with her finger.